While Kirby series games were never supposed to be taxing, some players who grew up with Kirby may find Return to Dreamland’s return to the series roots too easy. It’s like dusting off a Super Nintendo game you played as a kid and realized while revisiting it again a decade of playing games sharpened your skills.
I'm honestly frustrated, because this should be the best traditional Kirby game ever, and in some ways it is. It looks wonderful, it has co-op (of the "everyone but Player One is optional" variety, wherein the camera follows Player One and others just respawn next to Kirby if he dies), it has the widest variety of offensive moves I've ever seen in a Kirby game, and it even has a couple of cute minigames. But the complete lack of difficulty makes what should be an enthralling game sometimes boring.
I know I'm going to have to back that up, given that you couldn't die in the previous Kirby game, and I loved that one -- and given that Kirby has never exactly been synonymous with brutal difficulty, and that's kind of the point.
But Kirby's Return to Dreamland, unlike Epic Yarn, centers on giving Kirby the most impressive, most exciting, and most powerful powers he's ever had, and then fails to put them to any kind of interesting use. Really, the only ability you have to master in order to succeed in this game is pushing the attack button.
While it doesn’t have the challenge of Donkey Kong Country Returns or the charming art style of Kirby Epic Yarn, Kirby’s Return To Dream Land is another formidable entry in a line of great side-scrolling Wii platformers.
It's a perfectly tame, perfectly predictable little platformer whose only real edge comes in its cooperative design and, to a lesser degree, in how dauntingly unforgiving the later, "secret" stages can be. If you don't have any friends to play with, you can safely pass on Return to Dreamland. It's perfectly decent solo, but Kirby can do better than "decent." With friends, however, it's wild, infuriating, and fun.
This is the kind of game you could once find in abundance on the SNES and Sega Genesis, now refined to a distilled and ultimately superior form. Videogames simply do not get any more pure than Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
Want some juicy spoilers for Kirby's Return to Dreamland? I'm talking about end of game stuff here. It seems that someone has leaked out details about end game information and bonus modes. I'm not going to publish that content here because it's simply too far into the realm of spoilers. If you really, really want to know about some of the final events in the game, hit up the link below.
It's hard to believe we're now finally just a few days away from the release of Kirby's Return to Dream Land. This game has had one of the longest and most trouble development cycles in Nintendo's history. Its journey began over seven years ago, way back in the GameCube era, and we've seen that console's lifetime come to an end, then a successor announced, then that successor coming to the end of its own time in the spotlight while the game has still languished in development limbo...
For most Wii owners, only two titles really matter this fall - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Kirby's Return to Dream Land. Zelda is still a month away, but no doubt some of you are curious how Kirby fares. Will Return to Dream Land be a great way to pass the time until Link's new adventure?...
...it is a step-up from last year’s visually delightful but overly simplistic Epic Yarn, and is a decent, but unremarkable return to squishy form for the pink puff. Just try and play through it with a friend or two for maximum enjoyment.
